Science
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'The Ball Method' trailer introduces Alice Ball, chemist who discovered treatment for leprosy
In 1915, Alice Ball, a recent graduate from the College of Hawaii with a master's in Chemistry, started work on investigating the chemical properties of chaulmoogra oil. This extract, derived from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree, was first used to treat leprosy in China over six hundred years ago but the substance was too...
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'Spider-Man: Far from Home' and Physics of the MCU Multiverse
In a scene from Spider-Man: Far from Home, first seen on Ellen, Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Tom Holland) meets Quentin Beck/Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal) and discovers the new superhero is not from his universe but from a parallel Earth. Beck explains, “There are multiple realities, Peter. This is Earth, dimension 616. I am from Earth-833. We share identical...
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Interview with 12 Monkeys Science Advisor Sophia Nasr
As the hit time-travel TV show 12 Monkeys enters its fourth and final season, we talked to the show's season four science advisor, Sophia Nasr. Sophia is an astroparticle physicist working on dark matter. We talked to her about the work she does at UC Irvine, why dark matter (not the show) is so important,...
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God is an algorithm: why we're closer to a Black Mirror-style reality than we think
This article contains spoilers about Black Mirror, season four Do we have free will, or are we controlled by a higher power? The capacity to act and determine one’s own actions in an increasingly technologised world is the most prominent theme in the latest season of Netflix’s Black Mirror. And the question writer Charlie Brooker...
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The Force of biology is strong in 'Star Wars'
Star Wars: The Last Jedi follows the journey of Rey as the heroine discovers and learns about the Force, just as her teacher Luke Skywalker and his father Anakin did in the Galactic Rebellion and Clone Wars (more on this later). This raises an obvious question: What is the Force and where does it come...
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What the robots of 'Star Wars' tell us about automation, and the future of human work
Millions of fans all over the world are eagerly anticipating this week’s release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the eighth in the series. At last we will get some answers to questions that have been vexing us since 2015’s The Force Awakens. Throughout the franchise, the core characters have been accompanied by a number...
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Star Wars' last Jedi may use the Force of quantum science
As Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens in theatres and its heroine Rey seeks to learn the ways of the Force from an aged and isolated Luke Skywalker, it raises some obvious and ongoing questions: Is there anything in science — particularly in quantum physics — that resembles the Force? Can objects be manipulated instantaneously...
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Speed Comparison: The Orville vs. USS Enterprise
In The Orville episode, "Pria," we learn that the ship can travel upwards of ten lightyears (ly) an hour. Like the warp factor scale used in Star Trek, this is a measure of a ship's speed. To determine which ships are faster, whether the Orville is faster than any of the ships that have borne...
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VX Nerve Agent and The Science Of 'The Rock'
On February 13, 2017, Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was murdered at a Kuala Lumpur airport with VX nerve agent, a particularly terrible chemical weapon. In an assassination plot that is stranger than fiction, the deadly chemical agent was delivered as a binary compound. Two women, allegedly believing they were...
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Why War is Inevitable on 'The Expanse'
Two hundred years in the future, humanity has colonized the Sol System -- Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt, and some of the Outer Planets -- in the TV series The Expanse. Resources are scarce on Earth and the planet relies heavily on resources from the Belt to run its global economy. Despite migrating to...
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Staying warm with a box of radiation on 'The Martian'
In the 2015 science fiction film, The Martian, NASA astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) finds himself stranded on Mars after being struck by debris during a forced evacuation. Left for dead, the intrepid astronaut must not only survive on the barren planet, he needs to find a way home. Mark must use every resource at...
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Deciphering the Science and Linguistics of 'Arrival'
Communication is one of the messiest things we humans do on a daily basis. We translate the thoughts inside our head into words that another person (hopefully) can understand. Assuming this other person shares a common language and culture, this should be easy (most of the time). But even when we do share a common...
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An Interview With A Particle Physicist On What It Takes To Become A Ghostbuster
Ghostbusters is set to hit theaters in just over a month, and while the film might be fiction, it has some basis in actual science. We've already looked at why the Ghostbusters reboot is important and the real-world physics behind the Proton Pack. This time, I am interviewing the MIT particle physicist, Lindley Winslow, whose...
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An Interview with the Real Scientist who Redesigned the Ghostbusters Proton Pack
In my last article, I looked at the science behind the Ghostbusters' Proton Pack. The Proton Pack is a miniature particle accelerator and the design incorporates technology and some real-world physics. Many of the movie's designs and props seen in the Ghostbuster's reboot was the work of experimental particle physicists, James Maxwell and I had the...
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Is Star Trek's Famous Transporter Really a Death Machine?
Star Trek's transporter is about every fan's dream method of travel. Step onto the platform and you are instantaneously disintegrated while the information from every single atom in your body measured. The energy from being disintegrated is beamed into space and the information gained is used to reassemble you. Need to get to Mars in...
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The Science of The Ghostbuster's Upgraded Proton Pack
The Ghostbusters trailer contains an Easter egg hidden in the whiteboard filled with physics equations. This Easter egg goes by quickly but if you pause at just the right moment, you will see one "equation" on top is a URL that spells paranormalstudieslab.com. Fans will recognize this is a nod to the original movie as...
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The New Ghostbusters Are Women And Why It Matters
The latest trailer to the new Ghostbusters came out last week and fan response has been resoundingly negative. Within hours of release, the trailer had garnered twice as many dislikes to likes on YouTube. While vitriol from fans is expected, the 1984 movie is a classic, so the almost 1-to-2 like to dislike ratio is...
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Can you travel The Tube 'Futurama' style?
Set in the year 3000, the series Futurama features one of the most interesting forms of personal travel—pneumatic tubes. These were used primarily in the late 19th to the early 20th century to transport small packages over short distances, typically within a building or city. Though it is in very limited use today, there has been renewed...
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Is Spider-Man's Wall-Crawling Impossible?
Earlier this month, scientists from the University of Cambridge published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled, "Extreme positive allometry of animal adhesive pads and the size limits of adhesion-based climbing." This article said basically one thing: geckos are the largest creatures that can climb walls. Stephen Colbert lamented the study's finding on The...
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The Physics of the Death Stars and Starkiller Base in 'Star Wars'
The Star Wars films feature not one but three battle stations capable of destroying planets. In "A New Hope," the DS-1 Orbital Battle Station employed a super laser powered by a hypermatter reactor to destroy Alderaan. Following the "Battle of Yavin," the Empire returned with the Death Star II, an even more formidable weapons platform...
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The Physics of Explosive Decompression in 'The Expanse'
In the season 1 episode, CQB of The Expanse, the flagship of the Martian Congressional Republic Navy's Jupiter fleet, The MCRN Donnager, finds itself in a space battle with the six ships that attacked the Canterbury. Seriously outgunned, the Martian ship takes heavy damage from railgun fire; Canterbury med-tech, Shed Garvey (Paulo Costanzo) is struck...
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Is the 'Limitless' Space Elevator based in reality?
In the Limitless episode, "Headquarters!", Brian Finch (Jake McDorman) tracks down the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives to get his own office. This quest is important to Brian as he sees his role in the FBI as not to only fight crime but the “Enemies of Joy,” and he needs his personal "Headquarters!" to do...
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Can the 'Orphan Black' Project Castor prions be an STD?
In the penultimate episode of season 3, we learned a key piece of information about the Orphan Black clones—the origins of the Castor and Leda Projects lie within a single solitary individual person, Kendall Malone (Alison Steadman). This mysterious woman with a murky legal record is not only a genetic chimera and hence able to...
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Can Kira's stem cells save Cosima in 'Orphan Black'?
Times are getting pretty tough for Cosima Neihaus (Tatiana Maslany), the one-woman Clone Club R&D department in the Orphan Black universe. What started out as an irksome cough has progressed into a full-blown autoimmune disorder affecting her respiratory and reproductive systems. In one recent episode (Community of Dreadful Fear and Hate), the extent of Cosima’s...
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Can clones in 'Orphan Black' fall on different parts of the sexuality spectrum?
We’ve considered an awful lot about what makes Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), Alison Hendrix, (Tatiana Maslany), and the swelling multitude of clones in the Orphan Black universe so dang diverse. Essentially, each week we’ve asked the science questions on the minds of all Orphan Black fans: “Why aren’t these clones identical?” “What gives? Aren’t they...
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Is it legal to own human clones as seen on 'Orphan Black?'
So far, this series on the science behind Orphan Black has made a number of conclusions, or should I say clone-clusions? To very briefly summarize: (1) it’s hard to make a synthetic genome; (2) it’s harder to make viable clones, even without first synthesizing their genomes; (3) clones can be wildly different from each other...
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Does epigenetic variation explain the differences among Orphan Black's clones?
In a recent a blog post (nature vs. nurture), I outlined how it is that we aren’t much closer to understanding what makes each of the clones of Orphan Black totally unique. Though they sure do look alike, Orphan Black Wikia - Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) is a rebel, Orphan Black Wikia - Alison Hendrix...
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What is "Evo-Devo's" role in Orphan Black?
Season 2 of Orphan Black left us with a couple of doozies. First and foremost, we found there is But we also found out that the scholarly clone Orphan Black Wikia - Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany) is perhaps . Luckily, Cosima is a biologist currently working from inside the maligned Dyad Institute so at least...
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Does Nature vs Nurture explain differences among the clones in 'Orphan Black'?
The third season of BBC America’s critically acclaimed Orphan Black picked up right where it left off. Once again the defiant Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany), brainy Cosima Niehaus (Tatiana Maslany), and straight-laced Alison Hendrix (also, somehow, Tatiana Maslany) are cascading through the Orphan Black universe as technologically impossible clones (as discussed in two previous blog...
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Are 'spindle proteins' preventing human cloning on Orphan Black?
Last time we learned that modern synthetic biology is still (thankfully?) years away from synthesizing human genomes. But I also hinted that the challenge of writing a genome from scratch wasn’t the only thing preventing the Dyad Institute from dominating the world with an army of clones. In episode 6 of season two, To Hound...
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Did Rose murder Jack in the Titanic drowning scene?
Whether it is because people are trying to spoil one of the greatest romantic movies, or they are just trying to convince themselves that Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) was really supposed to die, the debate about the scene when Rose (Kate Winslet) drops Jack into the sea is still going on. The question everyone is asking...
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Is the science presented in Contagion relevant and accurate?
Contagion is one of the few Hollywood films to employ on, the whole, highly credible science. As a movie "Contagion" more than hits home and, in my view, the most frightening aspect is the deliberate feel of the mundane and ordinary. It is skillfully brought to the forefront of the proceedings by its director Steven...
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Can synthetic biology create Orphan Black's clones?
Ever since Frankenstein, science fiction has warned us of the dangers science and technology pose to our very humanity, and the BBC America series Orphan Black does a better job of this than most. As if it weren’t creepy enough to clone humans and clandestinely spy on their lives, the ethically questionable Dyad Institute also...
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Surfing on 'Interstellar' Tidal Waves
In the movie Interstellar, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) lands the Ranger 1 on Miller’s planet, a water world orbiting the supermassive black hole, Gargantua. Initial scans show the planet rich with the organic molecules, water, and sunlight necessary for life. Instead, what the team encounters is a shallow water world with 1.2-kilometer high waves. These...
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